On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 02:11:50 +0900, Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gluesoft.co.jp>
wrote:
> Assuming you guys know that the use case for the value is Ruby; I don't
> think people who wants to use ruby on the web is "very few".
>
> The next question is how many percent of ruby usage would use this
> feature. I don't have the data, but if we learn from publishing, most
> published materials apply this rule to Ruby today. So, I think "very
> few" is too strong. The basic idea of the feature is small Kana in Ruby
> are too hard to read. It's even harder to read small letters on screen
> than when printed.
It all depends on the perspective, but I would say the need for
full-size-kana
is indeed quite limited. First it is specific to the Japanese language.
Within
Japanese, it is limited to documents using ruby. Then, it is a stylistic
choice:
some authors will actually prefer the small size kana.
It doesn't mean there is no real use case, but it is a specialized one.
It is the most prominent specialized use case we currently have. I think
it would
be a good opportunity to use it to drive a generic solutions that can
benefit others.
> Regarding the "full-size-kana" or general @-rules; I'm more than happy
> to agree with @-rules if there were several use cases just like CSS3
> Lists @counter-style does. I actually like the idea very much, and I
> heard some people like it too. But as far as I know, "full-size-kana" is
> the only use case for now. As long as there's only one use case, I think
> developing @-rules is too much feature.
>
> If we find more use cases in future, we could migrate "full-size-kana"
> to @-rules as CSS3 Lists did from CSS2.
A few other specialized used cases have been mentioned. Of course, they
are all relatively minor, but that's the point: since they are unlikely to
be addressed individually, trying to aim for a generic solution that
solves all in one go sounds better to me.
A few examples, either already mentioned or reasonable to expect:
* Removing accents. This cannot be solved properly in the generic case, so
the WG has (rightfully) rejected a hard-coded text transform to do that.
But in more limited contexts, it would often be perfectly doable for
authors to define a custom rule that removes accents the way they want it.
* Hakon has mentioned mkhedruli to asomtavruli
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Other_forms_of_case
* hiragana to katakana: the mapping is easy to determine, and this could
be desirable once in a while for stylistic reasons
* mapping U-2014 to U-2015 (or the other way around), as mentioned in the
writing modes discussion.
* ſ (long s) to s
Regards,
- Florian